Finding a Topic for your Doctoral Project
As you start the process of thinking about what topic you might pursue for your capstone Doctoral Project, you might find it helpful to study the list below of papers that either are in progress with current students in our program or have been recently completed and deposited.
Further, you may find it helpful to review deposited DMA papers in the IDEALS repository of dissertations and theses in the Music and Performing Arts Library (https://www.library.illinois.edu/mpal/research/music/ )
See here, too, for a Powerpoint presentation with useful tips (PDF).
Selection of Recent and Current Illinois Doctoral Project Topics
The String Quartet Business in 21st-Century America: Innovative Enterprise, Diverse Residencies and Community Building
Coordinating Mind and Body: A Comparison of Three Somatic Approaches for Improving Wellness and Performance in Pianists
Aaron Copland’s In the Beginning: Context and Creative Process
From Paper to Performance: Problems and [Digital] Solutions in Operatic Piano-Vocal Scores
Recent Works for Horn by Portuguese Composers: An Annotated Guide
The Impact of Yoga on Conducting
Possibilities for Trombone Performance in the Sacred Music of Andreas Hammerschmidt: Introduction and Performance Edition of Selected Works
The Use of Subtitled Illustrations to Enhance Audience Understanding of Lieder: An Experiment in Music Appreciation
Performance Issues in the Solo Cello Music of Iannis Xenakis: A Performer’s Guide to Nomos Alpha and Kottos
The Accompanying Style of Jazz Pianist Mulgrew Miller
Fantasia Elements in Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s Petites Pièces pour le Clavecin (1754-57)
Radiohead’s Subterranean Jazz Structuralism: The Music of Louis Armstrong, Alice Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Charles Mingus in Ten Compositions by Radiohead
A Step Beyond the Nineteenth-Century Paradigm in Higher Education: Exploring Arts Entrepreneurship
Scheherazade: A Multimedia Presentation of an Arrangement of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade Symphony Featuring Solo Harp
Memorization in Trumpet Pedagogy: A Qualitative Case Study of its Integration in the College-Level Applied Studio
Guidelines for Teaching the Soprano Voice at the Kenyan High School with the Use of Indigenous Music
An Analytical Study of Eun-Hye Kim’s 12 Piano Suites Les douze signes
Expanding the Cultural and Economic Future of Jazz Music: A New Jazz Theater Curriculum
Promiscuity, Fetishes, and Irrational Functionality in Thomas Adès’s Powder her Face
The Humboldt Brass Band: An Early History and Critical Edition of a Post-Civil War Amateur Town Band and its Part Books